The kingdom of Bizyland is in trouble when the evil ruler of the neighboring land (Lasyland) uses a magic mirror to swap kingdoms and kidnap the princess. It's up to the king's chosen warriors to reverse the spell cast by the mirror and save the princess.

Game objectives

Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.2.1

Fastest Real Time

2 Player

Comments

A 2-player game for a 2-player day. Using teamwork both characters make short work of each level. In each level you trace a trail of magic behind you, and once you close it off it changes that portion of the level back to the colorful Bizyland. Once you change a high enough percentage of the level back to normal you win.

Character selection. The pink girl is by far the fastest character. Her weakness is that it takes a long time to respond to controller inputs (10 frames) which isn't a problem for a TAS. Both players can choose the girl, but the game can't process both characters moving so fast and every level would move at half speed due to all the lag. It would also make the strategy for every level nearly identical. The blue boy is the average character with no strengths or weaknesses and is chosen to team up with the pink girl.

Items in the game are hidden until you complete a section of the level. The treasure chests can contain strength boosts, mirror fragments, fairies, clocks, and boots of speed.

When a section of the level gets completed the game pauses for a length of time directly related to how big the section was. The game always fills in the smallest area that's sectioned off, so it's not possible to fill in more than half of the level at once. But, as you get down to the individual pixels the game gets wildly inaccurate at determining what percentage is completed. As an example, trying to section a level in half will yield 50.6% of the stage being filled in even though it's considered the 'smaller' half. And sometimes a single extra pixel will provide a full extra percentage point for completion and other times a full extra square centimeter will only give a few tenths of a percent. I attempt to get as close to the minimum required percentage as possible.

Stage by stage comments

Level

Percent

Details

1-1

53%

The enemies along the wall will only hurt you if you run into them

1-2

53%

Flying enemies can damage you if they hit your line while you're still drawing it, but only if they hit it from the right direction. Otherwise they just bounce off it.

1-3

55%

At the end of every world you're shown a screen with all the fairies you've saved and all the mirror fragments you've collected. The princess is trapped inside mirror, but you free her just the same in the end even if you don't collect the pieces.

2-1

57%

If you try and touch a teammate's line before it's finished you get a bit of a surprise with an alarm bell and an enemy that appears and moves along your trail to catch up to you and hurt you if you don't finish your section fast enough.

2-2

57%

2-3

60%

The game can't process too much going on at once, so there are lots of lag frames throughout the more intense levels. If any projectiles hit your trail before it's complete, then it damages you

3-1

63%

3-2

63%

3-3

65%

4-1

67%

4-2

67%

4-3

70%

5-1

73%

5-2

73%

5-3

75%

6-1

80%

6-2

80%

6-3

82%

7-1

86%

7-2

86%

7-3

88%

Everything Hurts. Avoid it all :)

Possible Improvements

Better understanding of how the game calculates percentages would certainly prove useful. It also occurred to me during the writing of this submission text that it could be faster to choose the pink girl for player 1 instead of player 2. A lot of the flying enemies appear on the left side of the level, so there would definitely be a whole new strategy in maneuvering around them.

Screenshot

16927, 19269, 23664

Mothrayas: This game features some reasonably novel gameplay not commonly seen in TASes, and it's a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, the pauses after each section completed and the general amounts of lag in the game hurt the pacing a lot. Also, while each level does have its own nuances in strategy used, ultimately they mostly are cleared the same way, especially early on - with each level cleared in a quite short time, while having a relatively long delay between each level. Even those who voted yes for this movie and commented in the thread noted its repetitiveness. As such, accepting for the Vault.